Archive

Quotes

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

—Charles de Gaulle, 1963

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

—Laozi

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1787

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

—H.L. Mencken, 1921

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

—Al Smith, 1933

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

—Alexander Hamilton, 1787

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

—George Borrow, 1843